I had assumed it would be a deputy, and that I wouldn’t see Yuki again for three days at the earliest.
As it turned out, my assumptions about Yuki were useful mostly as a running inventory of things I had gotten wrong.
Yuki closed the door behind her and crossed to the small kitchen table calmly, as if entering a room she already controlled. She took one chair, leaving the other for me.
I considered making her ask.
Petty.
Tempting.
Not useful.
I sat across from her. Yuki placed the folder between us and set the phone beside it.
Her eyes moved to the phone. “You have no contact with your handler.”
I looked at the phone. Then at her. “That seems to be the current arrangement.”
“It doesn’t have to remain the arrangement.”
I needed to call Mama before she called the State Departmentswitchboard and got someone who had never heard of me. The Catholic guilt was already loaded.
I didn’t reach for the phone.
Good for me.
Character growth, apparently, looked like not grabbing bait before breakfast.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“A controlled channel.”
I looked from the phone to Yuki before asking the obvious next question. “Controlled by whom?”
“By me.”
“That wasn’t the comforting answer you may have intended.”
“It wasn’t intended to comfort you.” She rested one hand lightly on the folder, as if we had finished with the object on the table and arrived at the reason she had brought it.
“Your handler will try to reach you,” she said. “He won’t be able to unless we allow it. When he does, his instruction will be simple.”
“You seem confident.”
“I am. He’ll tell you to exploit the bond.”
My body locked before I could stop it.
“Your handler’s name is James Davis,” she said. “He’s forty-six, works out of Langley, and holds authority over operations in three regional districts. His grandmother was Mexican.”
A detail that precise was a message. Ashenmere hadn’t built a profile. They had built several: Davis, the assignment, the embassy staff, and likely every person who had breathed near my clearance file.
Including me.
“Efficient,” I said.
“Necessary.”